On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 10:51 +1100, Terry Denovan wrote: > smoothly again... Im just wondering, when I run "top" it shows the > memory used at 476232k, is that right, or is something using the memory > that shouldn't be...
Linux likes to use unused memory for caching, which is most likely what you're seeing. > 09:52:38 up 370 days, 1:39, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.00 > 49 processes: 47 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: 1.1% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 98.8% > idle > Mem: 481492k av, 476232k used, 5260k free, 0k shrd, 88392k > buff > 350252k actv, 84k in_d, 10304k in_c > Swap: 979956k av, 59912k used, 920044k free 197564k > cached The buff and cached numbers are the important ones; apparently half your memory is being used to cache disk access. The kernel will free it up if needed by programs. There's more than one very good explanation of how memory usage is reported in the mailing list archives. My favourite is http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/2001/09/msg00744.html . Cheers, -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
